Web sites link recruits, colleges

A representative from Concordia University-St. Paul was on the other end, asking whether Spadafore, then a place-kicker for Gahanna, would be interested in Concordia's football program.

On a weekday evening in 2007, Nick Spadafore's phone rang.

A representative from Concordia University-St. Paul was on the other end, asking whether Spadafore, then a place-kicker for Gahanna, would be interested in Concordia's football program.

It was one of the last places Spadafore would have considered on his own. But he had help.

He had used College Bound Athletic Connection, a local nonprofit organization that connects athletes in high school and junior college with college coaches.

After graduation, Spadafore was set with a half-scholarship and an acceptance letter to the Division II school in Minnesota.

"It's like a middleman," Spadafore said of College Bound. "Middleman sounds not important, but here, it is. They help you get from point A to point B without all the junk in the middle. They help you filter it out."

The group's Web site, gocollegebound.org, was pioneering. The idea was fashioned by Randy Emrich in 1999, well before the social networking that inspired newer recruiting sites became popular.

For a flat fee, athletes submit statistics and personal information that is compiled, posted and provided to college coaches. Interested colleges then contact the player's high school coach and begin recruiting.

"It's all about exposure," Emrich said.

Over the past five to 10 years, dozens of similar forums across the country have turned to the Internet to help athletes get exposure. Many have offered services to thousands of kids.

Takkle, one of the most widely used, was also one of the first to weld social media with athletic recruiting. Free to join, Takkle allows high school athletes to create profiles using photos, videos and statistics and to converse with other users.

Coaches, who keep in contact with site administrators to contact recruits, can browse through profiles, aided by the site's player-ranking system.

Newer startups are offering more active services than those of social networking.

PrepChamps, a North Carolina-based site founded by former Ohio Northern University football player Dean Bundschu, allows athletes to upload facts and figures. The site has updated the process by organizing the data by city and school, and it also sponsors camps and scouting combines.

One of the most innovative companies is local. GotGame?Media, which kicked off its site, gotgamerecruiting.com, in January, is based in Athens and Columbus. For $24.99 a month, kids can work with representatives to find the right college, but the company has taken it to a new level.

GotGame?Media's technology lets coaches enter the rosters from their previous 10 seasons into a program that produces data on who their most desirable athletes are. The program then matches that information to athletes registered with the site.

Soon, coaches will be able to enter that data into a cell-phone application that will spit out the names and locations of all area athletes who fit the profile and provide directions to them.

"It's a combination of Monster and eHarmony," said founder MarKel Snyder, a technologist by trade. "We are eHarmony.com, except we're not matching for love; we're matching for athletic talent."

The evolution raises the question: Is the Internet the only future for recruiting?

Ohio University sports administration professor Heather Lawrence, who has spent most of her professional career in intercollegiate athletics, says yes and no.

"Electronic communication, in one form or another, is the future of it, because even the cost of putting a stamp on a packet of information adds up so quickly for these programs," said Lawrence, who also works with GotGame?Media. "However, the one thing that you cannot duplicate is finding out a kid's character."

That's why most sites consider themselves a tool -- a "good first step," as Bundschu put it -- to hook up coach with player.

"The main way college coaches are recruiting now, they certainly use the Internet as a supplement," Lawrence said. "For most of them, it is not their first way they go looking for student-athletes."

Because the most talented athletes will get noticed on their own, the sites are most useful for athletes looking at the lower NCAA divisions or NAIA schools, as well as those playing sports that don't generate significant revenue.

"This kind of service is very useful for a kid who is not already a blue-chipper to get exposed naturally," Emrich said. "Anybody can come and get us to work for them."

But when the NCAA is involved, so too are its bylaws. Although the NCAA cannot regulate private companies, the sites must keep in mind its rules, which control when and how coaches can contact recruits.

No NCAA rules directly address recruiting Web sites, but regulations on e-mailing, text messaging and social-networking media have been tackled.

Because NCAA legislation is reactive, it would take a university complaint to suggest a rule change. And because of the NCAA's complex process of enacting regulations, Lawrence said rules can often be two to five years behind where they should be.

Before online recruiting, coaches had problems not with finding prospects but with having too much information on the ones they had.

Online recruiting aids have simplified and accelerated that process.

"Because of generational gaps, coaches just don't know how to use the Internet to recruit," Snyder said. "What we're doing is making a platform that makes it much easier to look out across the Internet, to find information that is relevant to them, and then to verify the information they find."

The system is not foolproof. After one year at Concordia, Spadafore transferred last season to NCAA Division III powerhouse Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio. His parents wanted him closer to home, and Concordia had finished 4-7.

The world of online recruiting considers itself a tool, not a panacea.

"I don't know if we'll ever be able to take over," Bundschu said. "The best way is still physical contact."

zswartz@dispatch.com

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